Decolonizing the University: Epistemic Hierarchies, Legal Orders, and Cognitive Justice

Abstract This article examines the neoliberal university through the lens of decolonial thought, arguing that contemporary higher education must be understood not only as a site of knowledge production, but also as a normative and quasi-legal apparatus that organizes legitimacy, authority, and exclusion. Moving from the notion of the coloniality of knowledge, as developed by Aníbal Quijano and further elaborated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Ramón Grosfoguel, Achille Mbembe, and others, the paper reconstructs the historical entanglement between colonial epistemologies, capitalist rationalities, and academic institutions. It shows how the modern university has functioned as a privileged space for the universalization of Western knowledge and for the reproduction of epistemic hierarchies that are inseparable from broader structures of domination. The article develops this argument along three interconnected axes. First, it analyzes the neoliberal university as a space structured by mechanisms of selection, evaluation, and academic commodification that reproduce not only social inequalities, but also legal-normative distinctions concerning what counts as legitimate knowledge and who is authorized to produce it. Second, it argues that the decolonization of the university requires more than curricular diversification: it calls for cognitive justice, epistemic pluralism, and a radical transformation of the relation between the university and society. Third, it examines the archive, language, and institutional space as key terrains in which coloniality is materially sedimented and normatively reproduced, proposing intercultural translation as a decolonial methodological option capable of challenging the epistemic monopoly of the modern university. The article ultimately suggests that decolonizing the university is not simply a matter of inclusion, but a practice of epistemic, institutional, and normative disobedience. From this perspective, the university can be reimagined not as a neutral site of universal reason, but as a contested space in which legal orders, knowledge regimes, and claims to justice are continuously produced, negotiated, and transformed.